But when I move to compile the desktop packages, I had some difficulties
that I could not figure out. For example, while compiling the following packages,
gnome-applets-2.18.0 gnome-panel-2.18.0 gnome-user-docs-2.18.0
I kept getting the same error message when I typed "make":

File "/usr/local/bin/xml2po", line 35, in <module>
import libxml2

There was nothing wrong in ./configure and I do have libxml2-2.6.27,
libxml++-2.18.0 and XML parser installed. As I have no knowledge in
using xml, I cannot trace what happened in that particular line "import libxml2". Is it a path problem or something else?

In addition, when I compile "control-center-2.18.0", there was
a dependency issue where hal is needed by control center, and
policy-kit is needed by hal-0.5.8.1 (I know I can disable this).
I actually found a package for policy-kit and successfully
install it, but the same error still existed.

And even I disabled policy-kit, I still had this problem while
configuring hal-0.5.8.1.
No package 'libvolume_id' found.

This is really tough to deal with. I searched the web and followed
some instructions to install udev-108. And I downloaded libvolume_id-0.71.0.tar.bz2 from a freebsd site, but could not
compile it. It seemed that there was no configuration file given.
So I could not run the Makefile included with that tarball.

So I cannot proceed to complete the installation of gnome 2.18.
If I need to provide more details,please let me know.
This post is already a little lengthy, so ...

From other posts I read on this forum, it is probably better to wait for Fedora Core 7 to get Gnome 2.18. I myself tried to install it on FC6 but had dependency problems. FC7 should be ready hopefully the last week of May.